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Japan

We left our house in the early morning (4:30 am!) to travel to Tarragona today, visiting the wedding of two dear friends of us. An international Japanese/Spanish couple that live in Shanghai. They host a party in Spain for the family of the groom. Nevertheless, a small delegation of Japanese did fly over.

At was a great party; Great food and I was amazed with the dancing. The elderly danced the waltz, the younger ones enjoyed salsa and the Japanese seemed keen to do horse-dancing on Gangnam Style. The Catalan received their Japanese, Korean and Dutch guests like family.

Eirik Bjørn Olson played a central role in introducing the Japanese to Salmon. He saw a opportunity for the Norwegian Salmon export and started ‘Project Japan’, where he promoted all kinds of seafood to Japanese people. Initially, Japanese said the Japanese wouldn’t eat raw salmon. The Norwegians pushed for ten years and never expected it was going to be that big. Now you can eat Salmon Nigiri in every city.

In fact For long time Japanese didn’t eat row salmon because of parasitic
worms.
Seems we started to eat it recently like 40 years ago or so since we started to import salmon from Europe like Norway(safety one:)
Especially Tokyo, normally Salmon sushi is not included in traditional sushi menu list!
You can’t find salmon sushi in Sushi restaurant at Tsukiji fish market even now

Just had my first taste of japanese barbeque, together with @chijs, @akinasuna and dirk from @unitedstyles. The Japanese really know how to prepare nice beef. The concept was ‘all you can eat’ but now I know it doesn’t necesseraly have to mean the food is simple.

I’d like to tell you about a new blog we have launched yesterday. First, let me tell you why we went through all the effort: Personally, I have kept a close eye on developments in countries like South-Korea, Taiwan and Japan over the last years, but have start to observe that India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, China and Thailand are entering the world stage as well in terms of innovations. Recently, I read in the New York Times that top graduates – both Asian and western – from US and EU universities are heading to Asia to grow with the market and establish companies that will certainly leave footprint in the future of tech. Looking for information about the market, frankly, good sources have always been missing. Together with me, a lot of Europeans and Americans are eager to be informed and connected with these important developments.

Out of this frustration, I have decided to contact TheNextWeb (my favorite tech blog) and ask them if I could start an Asian chapter of their popular website. Over the last weeks, I have assembled a team of influential tech writers from Korea, Japan, China, India and the US and have setup the first guidelines for the blog. Frankly, I did not have much time to blog, since I am busy working in Business Development at Spilgames in Shanghai, but managed to squeeze in time to time. The team reduces the workload, so that I can (hopefully) be editor in chief for this blog as a hobby.
We have just launched the blog and were fortunate enough to receive media attention from powerful blogs including Techcrunch, Inquistr, Bright and Thenextweb. Now, the champagne bottle is empty, and we see that our traffic stats measuring the vistors went through the roof, and now the real work will start! We have noticed that beside Europe an US, we are also receiving a lot of visitors from South America. Hoping to increase these numbers, we are going to bring you:

Asian Industry insights – our experienced team will bring you comments and analysis from the Asian market.

Translated local news – Get aquatinted to the Asian market by reading news that might otherwise have been hidden from you.

Coverage from local events – Get up to date information about conferences, meetups and background of Asian webscene.

If you haven’t already made sure to be informed about current events and industry insights from Asia on Thenextweb.com/asia, follow us on RSS, Twitter or Facebook.

Did you meet?

Let me take a brief moment to introduce you to the fabulous writers that we have.Regina Walton
Lived in South Korea for eight years, moved back to the USA this year and now lives in New York, NY. Founder of Organic Social Media, providing blogging and social media services. Used to write columns for the Korea Herald newspaper. Earned her master’s in international studies from Ewha Womans University, earned her J.D. from University of California, Hastings College of the Law and earned her B.A. in English and philosophy at UCLA.Follow Regina on Twitter or go to her LinkedIn.com profile, MediaBistro.com page or blog for more information.

George Godula
George Godula, Shanghai resident for 4 years, is co-founder of Web2Asia – a full-service market entry partner for Western Internet companies in China, Japan and Korea. The company additionally incubates and invest in local start-ups in the region. George is also the Managing Director of the international direct marketing agency MH | direkt’s Asian subsidiary.
Read up on his company and subscribe to his Twitter account here.

Lucas Englehardt
Lucas Englehardt is a China entrepreneur, CEO of BloggerInsight and co-founder of Shanghai’s hacker space 88 Spaces. Featured in the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company and NPR, he advises, speaks and blogs about tech and startups in Asia. Originally from the US, he speaks Mandarin Chinese and enjoys stinky tofu. Learn more about BloggerInsight and follow Lucas on Twitter.

Dr Mathew McDougall
Group CEO & Executive Chairman of the SinoTech Group in Beijing, China. A group of Digital Marketing companies that help their clients in online marketing strategy, search marketing, online media buying/planning & operates large Ad Marketplace. Fanatical (and passionate) about Social Media and Digital Marketing.
Read up on his company, blog and subscribe to his Twitter account here.

Marc van der Chijs
A Dutch entrepreneur in Shanghai, over 9 years in China. CEO of Spil Games Asia, co-founder of Tudou.com and angel investor in Chinese start-ups. Married to Grace, with whom I have a son (Scott) and a daugher (Elaine).
Read up on his blog and subscribe to his Twitter account here.

Masaru Ikeda
Masaru co-founded consulting firms, system integrators, and outsourcing agency specializing in system engineering. As well as being the managing director’s role at some companies, he’s been contributing serial columns to nationwide newspapers and IT periodicals, and he’s been teaching opensource-based system integration processes to students from Asia in Japan’s national aid program for developing countries. Recently, he was involved in the project developing the cellphone-based wallet system being operated by Japan’s largest cellphone operator.

Suna Cho
Blog mommy, interested in the tech blogging world. Just left Sweden and arrived in Shanghai, China to start exploring.
Read up on her blog and subscribe to her Twitter account here.

Jaideep Khanduja
Business Head & GM-QA, S In his tenure of 5 years in this corporate, he helped corporate to grow from 20 PCs setup to fully structured network, centralized mail server, in-house ERP on Oracle database and D2K as frontend tool, Routers, Intelligent Switches, Firewall, Video Conferencing Room, 100% up-time etc. all in place. Jaideep believes that Innovation, Team Management, Time Management, Skills enhancement, Learning, Knowledge Management and Mentoring are the best tools to grow.

Jasmine Ji
Coordinator in Customer service at Chemtura Shanghai. Born in Shanghai 26 years ago. Cheerful, romantic and a good sense of Chinese humor, interested in Boardgames.

Originally called OzakajÅ, this is one of Japan’s most famous castles, it played a major role in the unification of Japan during the sixteenth century of the Azuchi-Momoyama period. Osaka Castle is situated on a plot of land roughly one kilometer square. It is built on two raised platforms of landfill supported by sheer walls of cut rock, using a technique called Burdock piling, each overlooking a moat. The central castle building is five stories on the outside and eight stories on the inside, and built atop a tall stone foundation to protect its occupants from sword-bearing attackers. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osaka_Castle
Somehow this picture attracted 3000 views upon upload, I’m very happy with the feedback I have got!

Shin-Sai-bashi

Do you see that shopping street next to the building with the Diesel advertisement? (bright path on right side of picture) That’s Shin Sai Bashi; The shopping area of Osaka. Fabulous. Absolutely love it. Downside is it was far too crowded to shoot all of the stylish people. Check flickr.com/photos/tags/harajukugirl/interesting/ to get an impression of that. This picture is taken from the roof terrace (full of trees) of a shopping mall. Had some warm green tea with this view, breathtaking Japan!

Docomo Osaka

Not a fabulous building, but it looked so creepy with the dark sky — I just loved it! It didn’t rain on the end, so the person on the bike prepared for nothing.